Remarks at the Toronto UCEA Global Associates Symposium
20 April 2002

International Education: A View From Ground Zero
By, Dr. Allan E. Goodman
President and CEO, Institute of International Education

I flew up this morning reading from a book about New York City and wanted to begin by sharing this passage:

The subtlest change… is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes … can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges… . The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

It may surprise you to learn that this was written in 1949, as E.B. White juxtaposed the dawn of the Atomic era with the construction of the United Nations headquarters building, which he called “the greatest housing project of them all … to clear the slum called war.”

In whichever context you choose to think about ground zero, I was struck by the fact that we have not come all that far in solving the problem of war since 1949. One reason has to do with international education.

Those of us engaged in international education tend to forget just few have this opportunity.

--International students account for less than 1% of enrollments in higher education in all but 20 counties today. The U.S. and Canada are in the group of 20. International students account for just under 4% of enrollments in the U.S.; the proportion for Canada is over 10%. My son AJ is helping with the numbers in two ways: he is a sophomore at Queen’s and a defenseman for the Gannoque Hockey team.

Despite America’s Superpower status and the global reach of U.S. “soft power,” our citizens are still not very well connected to the world.

--Less than 1/5th of Americans have a passport (and applications are expected to be down this year), only 7% of students in college now actually study a foreign language, and less than 1% study abroad.

--But the statistics that really caught my eye were in some new public opinion polls: 77% of adult Americas could neither name the president of Russia nor identify Kofi Annan as the Secretary General of the United Nations; 65% favor “temporarily sealing U.S. borders and stopping all immigration … during the war on terrorism;” and 60% told the Gallup organization that they believed the US already possessed a fully-functional missile shield.

International education, and especially the internationalization of the curriculum, is critical to changing these numbers.

For the Institute this is familiar terrain.

--We were founded in 1919, and almost immediately became involved in the effort to liberalize restrictive immigration policies.

--In 1920, we created the first scholarly exchange program and in 1923, we invented the Junior Year Abroad program. By the mid decade we offered the first summer study program in what was then a new Soviet Union.

--And for some 50+ years we have administered the Fulbright Program on behalf of the Department of State.

The challenges today are also all-too-familiar and involve:

--defending the student visa and sharing our expertise and viewpoint with Congressional staffs and the leadership of the Judiciary committees as they revamp the visa issuance process;

--encouraging programs that promote study abroad and the internationalization of the campus so that when students return home they do not feel like refugees. In this connection, I especially want to commend Scotia Bank and the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education for their establishment of a national prize for colleges and universities that promote this. Their model led directly to the Institute’s creation of the Andrew Heiskell Prizes and our effort internationally to share best practices.

--and continuing to function and attract students from countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh which are on the front lines of the war within Islam and where opportunities for mutual understanding are still quite rare.

It is especially essential for America to keep open its doors. A few weeks after 9/11, I had a visit from the head of the ministry for research and education in Germany where we discussed the need for U.S. leadership. Upon his return home, he wrote: "We learnt from the United States how enriching it is to win the interest and support of the brightest minds from all over the world and we trust in your country to remain as open as it has been in the past. If you closed your borders again… you would set a model that others would follow all too soon."

Six months after 9/11, I found myself in Berlin as part of the U.S. delegation at the ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Fulbright Program with the Federal Republic of Germany. Some 400 students and scholars from Europe and America attended the events. And I was struck by what their presence signified about attitudes toward international relations. America is at war and during previous eras when our and other countries were at war, people hunkered down, borders were closed, and students and scholars did not travel. Things are different now and that is a hopeful sign. It is also essential, because all the wars in which we are engaged -- against terrorism, poverty, HIV/AIDS -- require just the kind of collaboration and coalition-building that international education, and your service in its cause, promotes.

It will not surprise you if I conclude, therefore, by observing that the opportunity for an international education experience has a very major role to play in making the world safer and more secure.